JULY 7 & 8 UPDATE: The stove is here!

Isn't it pretty? I'm excited about how well it should go with the ceramic floor tiles we bought.

Dave left work a little early yesterday to go to Mandan, ND (about a three-hour drive away) to pick it up. The stove weighs 475 pounds, and the stove store owner had a pretty ingenious way of loading it, Dave said -- basically a furniture dolly with a jack on it. Once it was nearly in the van, Dave and this guy rocked it back and forth a little to get it in place, but Dave said there's no chance of getting it out of the van with that little manpower. The plan is to just leave the stove in the van until the area where it will live in the house is ready for it, so it won't need to be moved twice. (We'll see if we can put off unloading that long -- there's quite a bit of work to do to get that area ready, and it is nice to be able to get the whole crew to a destination in one vehicle, which only works in the van.)

This kind of woodstove (with soapstone on the sides) was hard to find anywhere in the area -- they seem to be manufactured only in Vermont. (There are also very nice ones manufactured in Finland, but those cost over $25k. We could afford that -- if we had decided to live in a used trailer house or RV. Otherwise, it's a little beyond our budget.)


Don got one more window framed up before he and Mary left for home on Monday. He had been hoping to do more, but this one turned out to be tricky -- he had to take down the ledgerboard (across the top) to get that window at the same height as the other south windows and the front door.

He also finished up the last window that he and Dave put in on the north side.

The door on the east side is all framed up, too. Now we just need to go find a door for that spot! We looked at doors at Menards, but nothing seemed right -- everything seemed too new -- nothing to fit in with the "granary charm" I'm after. We're going to call some friends who used to have an antique/architectural salvage shop to see if they might have anything on hand that would work. The trick is that door needs to be 36 inches wide (so we can get furniture into the house in some way), and I have a feeling that older doors were often more narrow than that. We'll see what we can find.

Mary and Sofia once again spent quite a while in the wading pool. Sofia can think of all sorts of ways to play with water -- pouring it from one container to another, taking it to water the flowers, dropping rocks into containers of water, dumping it on her mother's lap ... ah, well, I needed a little cooling off anyway.

Thanks, Mary and Don, for all your help this weekend!

... This little woodpecker has been keeping busy about the place the last few days. He seems to enjoy pecking on the electric poles.


... I was so disgusted with the weather yesterday! There was a 60 percent chance of rain at some point during the day, and after it missed us (besides a few drops) earlier in the day, I was watching blue clouds in the western sky eagerly in the late afternoon. I checked the radar, and sure enough, there was a big mass of rain headed right for us. Then, just 30 miles or so from here, the big mass of rain started to split. Some went north of us, some went south, and all we got was about 15 minutes of strong wind. Hmph. Now there's no significant chance of rain until next Tuesday. The garden -- not mention the crops nearby -- are starting to look pretty thirsty.